When I started this website I was sure that drop shipping is a very viable option to make money online and that this trend would grow with time. I do not state that drop shipping is dead as a model of online business, but it definitely does not become more popular two years after I commenced dropsiparea.com

Directory of dropshippers is a good place to start for those who would like to make baby steps with dropshipping. But one needs exclusive deals with merchants to make good living with it.

Otherwise you have the lists of merchants available to thousand other online entrepreneurs who try to get some coin. How can you beat your competition in this case? Reduce price and make your slim margin slimmer? Price wars are certainly not the way to develop your business if you are about to last.

I also intended to start drop ship forums to discuss issues of drop shipping – handling orders, dealing with customers, discussing various merchants, but at the time I tried to launch them they were not popular and I modified the forums into a sort of linking forum (that is not popular either). I have recently read a forum thread at searchenginewatch.com where some online business gurus shared their lists of the toughest industries to do online business for individuals – affiliate marketing and SEO were on the list.

So, I closed drop ship forums and do not try hard to promote the forums the way they are now.

My attempt to find other popular drop ship forums (my perception was that I did something wrong probably and there should be better resources out there) was not successful.

Summary: There is much discussion of drop ship business model, it attracts thousand of people as it sounds so easy – no products to buy, no products to store, no funds to invest, no risks to run. People buy this and start searching for drop ship suppliers and drop ship forums hoping to discover real (opposed to fake those merchants that just buy some stock fro other merchants, add their margin and promote their services as if thy true dropship product suppliers) dropshippers.

Yes, there are some good dropship wholesale suppliers available and worth your time:

Yes, when you are new to this it seems a rocket science, but if you spend two-three months with these forums you realize that there is nothing special about that. You understand the basic and realize that even experienced SEO gurus need time to achieve some results.

What are those affordable SEO optimization basics:

- onpage optimization
- offpage optimization (or, simply put, links)
- time (yes, it takes time, even if you have money to buy content and links)

If you run a website and need search engine submission service and affordable SEO optimization it means that you have an idea and topic you would like to develop with your website. So, you need to add new properly posted content and quality incoming links.

A great start is SEO beginners guide, mix it with a few forums and qualityblogs: I personally have about 40 SEO blogs in my newsreader, but it takes me 5-10 minutes to scan them daily as they write about the same stuff and post the same news (and my blog is no exception). And you will feel like promoting your own search engine submission services (though it takes months and years to achieve good results with this).

Summary: It is a matter of few weeks to grasp SEO basics. Another thing – to implement them and achieve results. If you are short of time or would like to simply outsource these tasks as they are quite boring then you need to find search engine submission service and affordable SEO optimization. Otherwise, just focus on DIY (do-it-yourself).

And do not spend much time on the forums – it is getting addictive fast – you just keep reading and reading despite the fact that you have already read similar threads and there is nothing new here.

A few other important things about SEO career – you need contacts in this industry to create some buzz when you need that and you need some good web property to provide cross promotion of new and established projects.

One way to track current trends of online business is to be a regular visitor to popular website selling places. I remember a year or a bit more back that craziness about MySpace and the number of MySpace related resources on sale. I was not a part of the game, but people say that it was a really hot technique to make quick money online.

This year MySpace related resources are replaced with a wide variety of video websites. Just a few samples of the recently published video websites on sale:

Is it time to buy or develop your own video website? Probably it is. A few questions that need to be answered first:

- a CONCEPT of your video website (how are you going to attract traffic to your website competing against youtube.com, revver.com and similar?)

- HOW TO MONETIZE your video website? There are some models in use, but you need a really popular website to apply any of this. And be prepared to incur considerable hosting expenses (I think you need a dedicated server to start with).

- CONTENT. I doubt you have any intention to make all videos for your website yourself.

Summary: When you see all this craziness about video nowadays your first impulse is start a video website too. But when you turn to developing a plan for your website you realize that it is not that easy.